Targeting Android Oreo

As of this month app updates uploaded to Google Play need to target Android 8. This has several implications. Targeting Oreo comes with an updated Support Library, which forces us to drop support for Android 4.0 and below. According to our Google Play data this will affect approximately 400 users. We are very sorry about that, but these users won’t receive further updates. Furthermore, Android Oreo introduced some restrictions in regard to apps running in the background. In the future in order to be able to run in the background KDE Connect needs to show a persistent notification. The good news is that you can hide the notification. The (slightly) bad news is that we cannot do it by default. To hide the notification you need to long-press it and switch it off. Other notifications from KDE Connect are unaffected by this.

1.10 Changes

These are the main changes of version 1.10. Not mentioned are countless small improvements and under-the-hood changes.

Mouse input now works with the same speed independent from the phones pixel density.

Several settings scatterd across the UI have been bundled into a single settings screen.

A lot of work has gone into how we handle SMS on the Android side in preparation for something huge. Stay tuned

Other changes

The desktop side has improved as well since my last post.

The windows build of KDE Connect gained support for keyboard input.

The plasmoid gained a couple of additions. In my last update I mentioned that it is possible to run commands from there. It is now also possible to lauch the command setup from there. Furthermore it is now possible to select files to share them from there.

The Linux Mobile App gained many visual improvements and features. It now supports sharing files and controlling the system volume.

If you are using Itinerary you can send booking information from the PC directly to the phone via KDE Connect.

It is now possible to send files directly from Pantheon Files (and other Elementary apps) and Thunar via KDE Connect.

Again, there are countless other improvements that I did not explicitly mention.

A big thanks to all people who contributed to this!

]]>https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/kde-connect-new-stuff-0x3/feed/42nicolasfellaKDE Connect on IRC and Matrix.orghttps://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/kde-connect-on-irc-and-matrix-org/
https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/kde-connect-on-irc-and-matrix-org/#commentsFri, 07 Sep 2018 15:38:12 +0000http://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/?p=129Continue reading KDE Connect on IRC and Matrix.org→]]>Since a few months KDE Connect has a Telegram group to discuss development. Since the over 100 people joined. I did not expect such an interest in it. Few people asked to have this group bridged to an IRC channel since they prefer IRC over Telegram. I’m happy to announce that we finally made this happen. Let’s celebrate the birth of #kdeconnect on Freenode. You can also access it from matrix.org (#freenode_#kdeconnect:matrix.org).

The rest is up to you! If you are interested in contributing to KDE Connect go and share your ideas with us and ask any question you have!

The Dolphin context menu entry for sending files to a connected device has been dropped in favour of a Purpose plugin, which groups nicely with other Share features and supports more apps such as Okular and Spectacle.

Albert Vaka added a presentation mode to Android which allows you to control slideshows from your phone. Aleix Pol added the same to the Kirigami app.

As I’ve mentioned before it is quite hard to find the settings where you can define your commands for the Run Command feature. The command list on Android now has a button that opens the appropriate settings on the desktop. Ivan Čukić added a few useful command suggestions to the menu.

Friedrich Kossebau added support for a “Find my PC” plugin. You might wonder now how often he loses his PC, but it also helps finding other devices that run the C++ version of KDE Connect, such as Plasma Mobile and SailfishOS devices. I added support for triggering it on the Android side.

Following a request on Reddit I added a dedicated Stop button to the media controller.

Chansol Yang made sure that the pointer speed when controlling the mouse from the phone is the same across Android devices with various DPIs.

You can now use special URLs to trigger commands on connected devices. The urls have the form kdeconnect://runcommand/<deviceid>/<commandid>. As those are quite complex I added a helper for it. You can copy an URL to the clipboard by long-pressing a command in the command list. You can write those URLs into a NFC tag to trigger the command when your phone reads the tag or use it to integrate with services such as Tasker.

The system volume patches have been merged. To make use of it you will need the latest KDE Connect from master for Desktop and Android and pulseaudio-qt installed. You can get pulseaudio-qt from git. We will to an initial 0.1 release soon and hope that distros will ship it soon.

Besides these features we also fixed some bugs and polished the UI a little.

Bluetooth support is progressing slowly. Matthijs Tijnk and Qt 5.11 fixed some issues. However, it is still not ready for the public.

We also improved our device support:

Aleix and I improved the Kirigami app. We improved the basic pairing workflow and you can now run commands and control media sessions.

Bart Ribbers fixed an issue that was blocking KDE Connect from building it for postmarketOS. I hope to see KDE Connect there as well!

We like to see KDE Connect on as many platforms as possible, and we need your help for it! Our workboard contains lots of ideas for new people to get started. You can ask for any assistance in our Telegram group.

For once this is not a post about KDE Connect (at least not directly). Besides KDE Connect I also work on several other KDE projects, one of them being the awesome Purpose framework created by Aleix Pol.

After Nate highlighted my latest work on Purpose (the new share menu in Dolphin) in his blog post I received quite some feedback. I’m glad that many people like the idea, but I also received some criticism/suggestions for improvements. This is always welcome as long as it is fair and objective. This was true for most comments, but unfortunately not all of them. I won’t even bother to reply to unfair and personal attacks for a useful feature, but rather like to respond to appropriate criticism and inform you about my future plans for Purpose.

First of all, for those who don’t know what Purpose is, it is an extensible framework to fulfill the developer’s purpose while providing an abstraction. Right now the only use-case is exporting/sharing a file, but more could be added in the future. It is used by Dolphin, Spectacle, Okular and other KDE applications and can export files to Email, Telepathy, KDE Connect, Nextcloud, Telegram (I did that one myself), Twitter, Imgur and many more.

For the share menu in Dolphin’s I received some critisism/suggestions for improvements:

Send via Bluetooth and send via KDE Connect are still separate in Dolphin’s context menu and should be in the ‘Share’ sub-menu as well. I 100% agree on that. In fact send via KDE Connect is already in the ‘Share’ sub-menu and I’ve uploaded a patch to remove the old entry. As for Send via Bluetooth: Someone would need to turn Bluedevils FileItemActionPlugin into a Purpose plugin. I’ll probably do it myself as soon as I find the time for it.

Dolphin’s context menu will be even more cluttered with this. It actually achieves the opposite. By combining actions like Send via Bluetooth and Send via KDE Connect into a sub-menu the top-level menu will be less cluttered.

I’m not going to use it, so I don’t want to have it. You can disable it in Dolphin’s settings.

I’m never going to use option XY, but it’s still there. Fair point. Some options are loaded conditionally, so e.g. the Telegram option is only present if Telegram is actually installed. For others this is not the case. I’m planning to make a config module to en-/disable options.

I don’t want to share my files by accident. Virtually all of the options require more than one click to do something, so it needs a weird accident to actually do something unwanted.

I’d love to see more applications/services adopting Purpose. So if you are a developer interested in integrating your application with Purpose please get in touch with me and we will figure out a solution. I’m especially looking at you, fellow KDE developers

Happy sharing

]]>https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/07/08/the-purpose-of-things/feed/13nicolasfellaKDE Connect on Plasma Mobilehttps://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/kde-connect-on-plasma-mobile/
https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/kde-connect-on-plasma-mobile/#commentsThu, 07 Jun 2018 17:59:00 +0000http://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/?p=73Continue reading KDE Connect on Plasma Mobile→]]>The digital world has changed over the last 10 years. The usage of mobile devices skyrocketed whereas the desktop market is stagnating. The trend is also going towards smaller and convertible devices. The mobile market is controlled by two major corporations. One of them is religiously cutting down your personal freedom and aiming towards a walled garden proprietary ecosystem, the other one is disrespecting your privacy enormously. With Plasma Mobile the KDE community is envisioning a mobile experience that is giving you maximal freedom while ensuring your privacy. It seems like a bold venture, but we have to at least try, right?

Plasma Mobile would not be a true KDE project without the same degree of integration with the desktop as we already have with Android devices. Therefore we aim to make Plasma Mobile a first-class citizen of KDE Connect.

How far are we?

Thanks to Aleix Pol there is a suitable UI for KDE Connect on Plasma Mobile already in our git tree. I was able to run it on Plasma Mobile. It has some rough edges, but is basically functional.

Some features that work so far:

Control media players

Remote mouse input

Lock the remote device

Find the remote device

Receive files

Receive remote commands

Why do I care about Plasma Mobile at all?

Chances are high that you won’t be dropping your Android phone for Plasma Mobile anytime soon. But even then you will be profiting from our efforts. To achieve feature parity with Android we will need to port some of the Android features to C++/Qt. This will benefit all your connected devices that run the C++ version of KDE Connect, e.g. other desktop devices, Sailfish OS phones or phones/tablets running another version of Linux (e.g. Ubuntu Touch). The new UI also provides room to integrate some controls that are only available on Plasma right now. This will improve the KDE Connect experience for non-Plasma desktop users.

Sounds great, what can I do?

You want to help? Awesome! I created a meta-task on Phabricator to track the current progress. It contains all the things that should be done as sub-tasks. Some of them are ideal beginner tasks. Just pick one you like and don’t be shy to ask for help. You don’t even need to have a phone running Plasma mobile to do it, you can develop it on your desktop machine and thanks to the awesome Kirigami Framework it will run on Plasma Mobile automagically. What are you waiting for?

]]>https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/kde-connect-on-plasma-mobile/feed/16nicolasfellaIMG_20180607_192146IMG_20180607_192849KDE Connect Junior Jobshttps://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/05/13/kde-connect-junior-jobs/
https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/05/13/kde-connect-junior-jobs/#commentsSun, 13 May 2018 11:16:59 +0000http://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/?p=67Continue reading KDE Connect Junior Jobs→]]>One of KDE’s Community goals for the next years is streamlined onboarding of new contributors. It’s very important that new people regularly join the community for various reasons. First of all, there will always be something to do and the more contributors the merrier! But there are also people becoming very inactive or leaving the community and these people need to be replaced. Furthermore new people bring in new and fresh ideas. It’s important to have people from diverse backgrounds in the community. Lack of community diversity manifests in several issues:

Lack of language diversity results in poor translations for non-widespoken languages and other internationalization issues

Having only English/German/Spanish/French speaking contributors leads to incomplete support for things like right-to-left layouts and CJK characters/input methods

Contributors with powerful hardware and good internet connection tend to ignore the need for performance- and bandwidth-efficient solutions

An example from KDE Connect: Most of us are from Europe where its common to use messengers like Whatsapp whereas in the USA it’s far more common to write SMS. Therefore we didn’t really had in mind that it’s important to have good SMS integration in KDE Connect until we actually had some people from the US at our sprint

People tend to not be aware of different setups other people might have, e.g. having an Android phone without Google Play Services is rare in Europe but common in China

To address these issues I am aiming to ease contribution for everyone. I believe that KDE Connect is a great project to get started in KDE development. After all, it’s the project I got started with myself. The codebase is small and IMHO quite sane. The modular architecture allows you to quickly get cool results without risking to break stuff.

To help you pick a task for your first contribution I started marking tasks as junior jobs on the KDE Connect workboard. I want to provide structured information for each task that helps you diving into it. I hope that other KDE projects will follow our lead.

Now I need your help!

Which information would you like to see in the task description?

What can we, the established developers do to make your first contribution easier?

What were the problems you encountered in your first contribution?

What are the lessons you learned during your first contributions that you want to share with others?

If you don’t please leave your feedback here in the comments and I will forward it to the appropriate places.

Your help will improve the overall community and thus the quality of our software in the long term!

]]>https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/05/13/kde-connect-junior-jobs/feed/13nicolasfellaVolume Control in KDE Connecthttps://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/volume-control-in-kde-connect/
https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/volume-control-in-kde-connect/#commentsMon, 30 Apr 2018 16:47:31 +0000http://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/?p=61Continue reading Volume Control in KDE Connect→]]>Definitely one of the best use cases of KDE Connect is this: Watching a movie while laying in bed or on the couch and controlling your unreachable computer from your phone without needing to stand up. Thanks to our new media control notification you can pause and skip without even unlocking your phone. But what if the movie is too silent? If your media player is implementing the MPRIS2 specifications you are already lucky and can control your players volume from KDE Connect. Plasma Browser Integration even adds that for Browsers. But what if your player doesn’t support it (looking at you, Spotify)? Or you want to control your system volume? Then you are out of luck. Until soon. We are adding a plugin to KDE Connect that enables you to control your system volume from the phone. How cool is that? Another neat little trick is tapping on the volume icon to (un)mute the system.

Implementation

The idea for this has been around for a while, but it was not until fall 2017 that I actually started implementing it. The implementation relies on PulseAudio. We are aware that not everyone is using it, so we don’t require it and hope that packagers do not make KDE Connect depend on PulseAudio. The first implementation was using the command line tool pactl to set the volume. Assuming you only have one sink it was working pretty well, except there was no easy way to ask for the current volume, so our volume slider would be wrong pretty often. I got around this by parsing the output of pactl in a horrible, horrible line of bash, but it was clear that this was not stable enough to actually go into prod. Also it was still not working with multiple sinks. The logical step was to make use of the libpulse. For some reasons there are a great deal of people that like the C programming language, but I don’t. Especially not the library style that comes with it. What I really didn’t like was the idea of mixing low-level libpulse C code with high-level Qt code. Luckily, the Plasma guys thought the same. The Plasma Volume Applet contains code that was acting as a bridge between the two worlds. So I “borrowed’ that code (isn’t free software amazing?) and after some intense head-against-the-table banging (turns
out both KDE Connect and Plasma PA both have a class ‘Device’ with the same include guard) it was working like a breeze, now even with multiple sinks.

Birth of a Framework

It was working really good, but the thought of having 20 files of duplicate code in two KDE projects wasn’t particularly appealing. We decided it would be best to extract the common code into a library that both projects can use. To make this possible the code needed quite some polish. The original author probably didn’t have in mind that it might become a library someday. After some work we now believe that the API can be declared stable and it can be released on KDE Extragear. We aim to make it an official KDE Framework once the code has matured enough. Extracting and releasing it as a library makes it easier for us to maintain it, but it also means that you can use it in your project! Furthermore, since it covers more use cases than just volume control it’s also possible to integrate more PulseAudio related features into KDE Connect easily. We are looking forward to your suggestions!

]]>https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/volume-control-in-kde-connect/feed/17nicolasfellaScreenshot_20180424-000806KDE Connect – Tips, Tricks and Misconceptionshttps://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/04/04/kde-connect-tips-tricks-and-misconceptions/
https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/04/04/kde-connect-tips-tricks-and-misconceptions/#commentsWed, 04 Apr 2018 05:00:42 +0000http://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/?p=53Continue reading KDE Connect – Tips, Tricks and Misconceptions→]]>Since my first blog post we got an huge amount of feedback and it’s amazing to see that you are as excited about KDE Connect as we are. This way I want to say “Thank you” for all your kind words and tell you that this kind of positive feedback is what keeps us going.

I would also like to share some tips and tricks about KDE Connect that you might not know yet, but first I would like to clear up a common misconception.

KDE Connect is not tied to Plasma

Many times people claim that KDE Connect is tied to Plasma. KDE Connect can be used with any desktop environment or even no desktop environment at all. A small portion of the UI is only available in Plasma, but most functionality is available on all platforms. However, most KDE Connect developers use Plasma, so issues in other DEs don’t come to our attention in our daily usage. If you find something that can improve the non-Plasma UX, please let us know by filing a bug.

If you are using Gnome you might be interested in GSConnect, a GNOME Shell extension that uses KDE Connects Android app. If you are using another GTK-based desktop you might want to install indicator-kdeconnect.

The misconception that KDE Connect is tied to Plasma likely comes from the fact that on some distros such as Debian the KDE Connect package depends on Plasma. This should not be the case and is highly discouraged by us. Please file a bug against your distros package if that is the case.

Add devices by IP

KDE Connect tries to discover devices in your network automatically. However, for various networking reasons this does not work in all cases. If your devices are not automatically discovered, but you are able to ping one device from another there is a good chance you can pair them by adding the device IP manually. Open up KDE Connect in your phone, go to ‘pair new device’, tap the three dots in the top-right corner and tap ‘Add devices by IP’.

You can both specify IP addresses and hostnames.

Filter notifications

Many messaging apps like Telegram got a desktop or web client. In this case you would get double notifications for each message, one from the phone over KDE Connect and one from the desktop client. In this case you want to take your phone, go to the ‘Plugin Settings’ and select ‘Notification sync’. You will get a list of all your installed apps and can select from which you want to receive notifications.

Runcommand Plugin

We receive a lot of feature request and are thankful for that. The bad news is, we cannot implement all of them. Some use cases are just too special. The good news is, we implemented a plugin that can serve a infinite number of use cases. You can specify commands on your desktop and can run them from your phone anytime. For example you can create a Shutdown command to power off your computer without leaving your bed. You can even create bash or Python scripts (or anything that is executable from bash) to do anything you can imagine. The best news is, it is already there. This has been around for quite a while, but most people didn’t know about it because it’s very hidden. We’re trying to make it more discoverable in an upcoming release. Right now you need to go to the system settings, select the Runcommand Plugin preferences and enter your commands. We’re aiming towards a better UX for this, but even right now, the possibilities are endless.

Rename devices

Sometimes you may want to rename one of your devices, e.g. when you have two from the same manufacturer and they show up with the same name. On the desktop side, go to the KDE Connect settings and in the top-left you will find a edit button. It’s the little pencil icon in the above screenshot. On Android it’s a little bit more hidden. Open up the left drawer and tap your devices name (in my case “The phone”) to edit it.

Notifications on the phone

One of the most loved features about KDE Connect is receiving your phones notifications on the desktop. But did you know that you can also do it the other way around? All you need to do is go to the settings on the phone and on the desktop, activate the “Receive notifications” plugin on Android and the “Send notifications” plugin on the desktop and enjoy your desktops notifications on the phone.

Keep screen unlocked

Another plugin that’s been around for a while but deactivated by default is the screensaver inhibitor. When you choose to activate it in the settings your screen won’t power off as long as your phone is connected.

Pair Desktop to Desktop

You can not only pair a phone with your desktop device, you can also pair a desktop with another desktop. It isn’t as powerful as connecting a phone with a desktop, but you can still do useful things like sharing files and links. We are looking to extending the capabilities. The same also works for two android devices.

I hope I could provide you some useful knowledge that makes you enjoy KDE Connect even more. As usual, if you want to support our development please consider donating to KDE.

]]>https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/04/04/kde-connect-tips-tricks-and-misconceptions/feed/23nicolasfellascreenshot_20180331-0306087939472913876397211.pngruncommandScreenshot_20180401-204210 (1)Building KDE Connecthttps://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/building-kde-connect/
https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/building-kde-connect/#commentsFri, 30 Mar 2018 10:54:49 +0000http://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/?p=41Continue reading Building KDE Connect→]]>After I shared the link to the KDE Connect Development Telegram group almost 20 people joined within 24 hours. I certainly did not expect such a interest in KDE Connect. When I joined the project about a year ago the hardest part for me was setting up a proper development workflow, meaning configuring, building, installing and debugging the application and interacting with git and Phabricator. To ease your start in KDE Connect development I would like to give you the guide I wish I had back then.

I will show you how to fetch the project, build, run and debug it using KDevelop. It’s an IDE by the KDE Community designed with KDE projects in mind. In theory you can use any IDE you like, if you figure out how to configure it properly.

You probably will find KDevelop in your distros repository. Install and run it.

Go to Project -> Fetch Project…

Search for KDE Connect client for KDE and click Get

After the project is fetched you click Next -> Next -> Finished

The install prefix determines where KDE Connect will be installed. Choose /usr if you want to override your distros package. In this case you might want to uninstall it.

Hit OK.

If you are getting cmake errors you are missing some development packages. The name of those depend on your distro. For example, the development package for KIO on Ubuntu is called libkf5kio-dev. Google should help you find all required packages for your distro. On Debian/Ubuntu you can use “apt-get build-dep kdeconnect” to install the build dependencies. On openSUSE you can install the dependencies using “sudo zypper si -d kdeconnect-kde”.

After you installed all required packages hit Build in the top-left corner.

Make sure there is no other instance of KDE Connect running by running “killall kdeconnectd”

After it build successfully hit Debug. You will be prompted with a window to configure the launch. You will need to do this only once. Hit Add -> Project Executables -> KDE Connect -> daemon/kdeconnectd . If this does not work you might need to adjust the path to the kdeconnectd binary.

Hit OK and you should have a running KDE Connect built from source!

Now, if you do any changes to KDE Connect you just need to hit Build and Debug again to apply it.

]]>https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/building-kde-connect/feed/8nicolasfellakdevelop_1kdevelop_2KDE Connect – New stuff Ihttps://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/kde-connect-new-stuff-i/
https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/kde-connect-new-stuff-i/#commentsThu, 29 Mar 2018 21:40:25 +0000http://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/?p=37Continue reading KDE Connect – New stuff I→]]>As I said a couple of days ago we got a lot to announce for KDE Connect. This is the first of many posts where I show you what we were up to. It may not be as exciting as you hoped for because the really big features are not-quite-ready, so hang on

First we squashed some bugs, including a pretty nasty crash in the NotificationsPlugin.

In my first post about KDE Connect I told you about the album cover art on Android. Thanks to Matthijs it now also works when the cover art is a local file, for example when you are using VLC. It already worked when the cover art was a remote URL, for example with Spotify. The cover art is now also shown in the media control notification and added to the Android media session.

When you send an image to you phone the notification now contains a preview of the image. The notification now also has a share button which allows you to quickly do something with the just received file.

If you use Nautilus as a file manager you will be pleased to hear that KDE Connect now includes a Nautilus extension that allows you to quickly share files across your devices.

As I mentioned before, the exciting features are yet to come.

Now is a perfect time to join our development team! The codebase is stable and allows you to quickly implement new features. If you got a basic understanding of programming you can quickly get a grasp on the technologies we are using (Java/Android and C++/Qt). If you are interested please join our Telegram group. Please note that this is a development group and not a general support group.